12 Numbers And Notes To Know: Ohio State vs. Indiana

The Buckeyes will head west into Tom Raper country this weekend to face Indiana in a border battle.

It’s the first Big Ten conference game of the season for OSU.

If the season ends the way they planned, the Bucks will bookend their conference season with a return trip to the Hoosier state for the Big Ten Championship Game.

This weekend’s game against IU isn’t quite as heated as the Buckeyes’ games with other teams from bordering states, but geography is geography.

The Ohio State vs. Indiana series in football is the source of some remarkable numbers, most of which are extremely tilted in the Buckeyes’ favor. This is usually limited to 10 numbers and notes in most weeks, but the IU/OSU series just has too many fascinating things to know.

Here’s a quick run through some interesting notes that TheOzone dug up, as well as a few from the OSU Sports Information Department.

0

Photos taken by Lee Corso featuring his team and the scoreboard during an Ohio State vs. Indiana game.

There is losing. There is getting embarrassed. There is getting humiliated. And then there is visiting fans taking over your stadium badly enough that they tear down your freaking goalposts.

1

Times Indiana has advanced past the Sweet 16 of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament in the last 25 years. OSU has done it four times over that span.

This has nothing to do with this weekend’s game, other than potentially providing you with some ammunition for trash talk in the tailgating lots.

2

Big Ten conference championships in Indiana football history. The Hoosiers won the league in 1945, when the college football universe had been turned upside down by World War 2, and in 1967, in the lag before the “Super Sophs” in Columbus and in the dying days of the Bump Elliott era in Ann Arbor.

They shared the 1967 title with Purdue and Minnesota (it was a really weird year in the league), making 1945 the only outright Big Ten championship in IU football history.

The Hoosiers did not play the Buckeyes in either of those seasons.

10

Times J.K. Dobbins has rushed for 100 yards in a game during his Ohio State career. The Buckeyes are 10-0 in those games, including the 2017 regular season opener in Bloomington.

23*

The Buckeyes are currently on a 23-game win streak in the series against Indiana (1991-present). That matches a 23-game win streak that ran from 1960-1986.

Really, though, they’ve won 24 in a row. The 2010 game was vacated by the NCAA.

29

The Buckeyes have gone 29 games without making a two-point conversion. The last time it happened was in the 2017 season opener against Indiana.

54

Jalin Marshall’s 54-yard punt return for a touchdown against Indiana in 2014 is still the Buckeyes’ most recent punt return for a score. (Excluding blocked punts.)

63

The Buckeyes (28) and Hoosiers (35) combined for 63 points in the second half of their 2012 matchup. OSU won the game, 52-49 en route to an undefeated season.

It is the most recent time the Bucks and their opponents combined to score 60 points in the second half of a game.

74-12-5

Ohio State has won 74 times against the Hoosiers, while IU has only 12 victories in the series.

But it really isn’t even as close as those numbers might indicate. Indiana went 5-0-1 against the Buckeyes from 1901-1913. That means that since the 1914 game, the Buckeyes are 74-7-4 against IU.

The Hoosiers have exactly two wins over the Buckeyes since 1951. They won in back-to-back years, 1987 and 1988, tied in 1959 and 1990, and have lost every other meeting.

Bug vs. Windshield has been more competitive over the past century.

159

Ezekiel Elliott had 159 yards rushing in just the third quarter of the Buckeyes’ 34-27 win over Indiana in 2015. He had touchdown runs of 55 and 65 yards during that quarter, and hit the 159-yard mark on just seven third-quarter carries. It’s the most recent time a Buckeye rushed for 100 yards in a single quarter.

1901

The Ohio State vs. Indiana series is the second-oldest against a current Big Ten opponent in Buckeye history.

Only Michigan (1897) is a longer-running series among conference members.

Neither game was a conference matchup at the time. The Buckeyes only joined the Western Conference, the precursor to today’s Big Ten, in 1912.

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2 Responses

I was at that 1996 game in Bloomington. Crazy scene, the Indiana team actually had to come back out of their locker room to surround the goal posts or there would have been 2 sets torn down. Of course Andy Geiger had the best come back when the Indiana authorities got mad. He said “Send me the bill, we will pay it”